Iran’s Communications ministry published a statement on its website (which isn’t available outside of Iran) that the original story was the work of “the propaganda wing of the West and providing its hostile media with a pretext emanating from a baseless claim.”

Communications Minister Reza Taghipour did confirm via the statement that while the government isn’t going to shut itself off from the rest of the Internet, it will instead build an Iran-only national intranet—the so-called Clean Internet. This network would reportedly operate much like a large corporate intranet—that is, easy to control and monitor—though Iranian officials have not commented on whether or not the Internet access will be cut once the national network is in place. [AFP via Mashable]